An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Sunday, April 29, 2012

National Poetry Month—Carl Sandburg "I Am the People, the Mob"

Note:National Poetry Month is
almost over and I haven’t posted some of my favorite poets.Can’t let it slip away from Carl
Sandburg.The biography has been
recycled on this blog a couple of time, adapted from my program Four Hundred Years of Unitarian and
Universalist Poets from John Milton to Sylvia Path.

Carl Sandburg, the son of working class Swedish immigrants, was born in Galesburg, Illinois on
January 6, 1878 and was, from the beginning, thoroughly American.His father labored
as a blacksmith’s helper for the Chicago,
Burlington and Quincy Railroad and struggled to support his wife and seven
children.

The second oldest, Charley, as he was called, was
compelled to find odd jobs from earliest childhood.He left school after eighth grade in 1891 and
struck out on his own to remove one hungry mouth from the family table.He joined tens of thousands of similar young
men in the life of an itinerant laborer, a hobo.He shined shoes, delivered milk, harvested
ice, laid bricks and followed the army of harvest
stiffs through the wheat fields of Kansas.While traveling he absorbed the lore of the
hobo, including the tales of Coxy’s Army.He experienced capitalist exploitation and like so many of his fellow workers was
radicalized.

When the Spanish American War broke out, Sandburg opted for adventure and a
steady paycheck by enlisting in the volunteers.Posted to Puerto Rico, he saw
no action but watched yellow fever
and the Armour Company’s tainted
pork and beans ravage the Army.

He returned to Galesburg upon
discharge and wrangled his way into the local Lombard College, a liberal arts school founded by Universalists.He supported himself with odd jobs and as a
fireman.Sandburg was delighted with the
open and embracing Universalism he encountered at the college, a welcome relief
from the strict Lutheranism of his
youth and street corner evangelists he encountered in his travels.He also discovered writing at the college
under the tutelage of liberal professor Phillip
Green Wright and his Poor Writers’
Club.He adopted not only
Universalism while on campus, but Debsian
Socialism as well.

After graduation Wright published
Sandburg's first volume of poetry Reckless Ecstasy on his basement
press in 1904.Two more volumes followed
in 1907 and 1908.Coming from an obscure
working class kid from the Midwest,
the books completely missed attention of the nation’s literary elite.

Sandburg determined to devote
himself more actively to the socialist and labor cause.In 1907 and 1908 he worked as an organizer
for the Wisconsin Social Democratic
Party in Milwaukee.He met Lillian
Steichen at party headquarters there in 1908 and married her.

Now with family responsibilities,
Sandburg moved to Chicago and took
up reporting for the Chicago Daily News.At first he worked the police and crime beat
and later covered labor for the liberal newspaper.He added criticism to his portfolio becoming
one of the city’s first serious film
critic before earning his own regular column.

Sandburg was also writing
revolutionary poetry, drawing on the city of Chicago for inspiration.In 1914 he exploded into the literary
mainstream when Harriet Monroe
published a group of his poems in her seminal Poetry magazine.In 1916 Chicago Poems was published to
international acclaim followed by Cornhuskers in 1918.He did not abandon his social
conscience.He wrote a powerful analysis
of the 1919 Chicago Race Riots that
attracted wide spread admiration.

His days as a reporter were now
behind him.He turned to literature as a
full time career.A charming collection
of children’s tales, Rootabaga Stories, caught the
attention of his publisher Alfred
Harcourt, who suggested that he undertake a children’s biography of Abraham Lincoln.Instead Sandburg labored for two years to
produce the two volume Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years.Breaking the academic mold of biography, the
books looked at youthful Lincoln’s life with a novelist eye and a poet’s
sensibility.

The enormous success of the books
finally gave Sandburg economic independence.He moved to a new home among the lovely Lake Michigan sand dunes and dedicated himself to completing four
additional volumes in his Lincoln saga.Abraham
Lincoln: The War Years won the Pulitzer
Prize for Biography in 1940.

During those same years, Sandburg
worked on his epic collection of American
folk songs.Carl Sandburg's American Song Bag
introduced generations to a great musical tradition and helped provide material
for the folk music revivals of the late 1940’s and again in the 1960’s.In public performances Sandburg enjoyed
pulling out his battered guitar and singing as much as he did reading.

His literary output was
prodigious.Not only did he continue to
turn out poetry, but he wrote a well-received novel Remembrance Rock and an
autobiography, Always the Young Strangers.

In 1945 the Sandburgs relocated
to Flat Rock, North Carolina, where he continued to work and raise prize dairy
goats.He also found a welcome among the
hardy North Carolina Universalists, who up held liberal religion in a
conservative area.

In 1951 Sandburg won his second
Pulitzer Prize for his Complete Poems.

Sandburg died in 1967, perhaps
the most beloved of American 20th
Century Poets.After a Universalist
funeral, he had his ashes returned to Galesburg to be buried under a stone
behind the small cottage where he was born.He lays there today next to his wife under a red granite Remembrance
Rock.

I Am the People, the Mob

I Am the people—the mob—the crowd—the
mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
done through me?

I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world’s food and clothes.

I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.

Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.